DISENCHANTMENT AND THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN

Resume: La Cite de enfants perdus de Jean-Pierre Jeunet et Marc Caro s'interroge sur l'ecart qui separe l'enfance, telle que vecue par le enfants, et le reve de l'enfance, tel que concu par l'imaginaire culturel A partir de travaux d'Arjun Appadurai sur la marchandisation (de enfants), le auteurs montrent make comments [i]or[/i] remarks le film examine, par de images fantastiques mais avec beaucoup de serieux, la perte (ou l'absence) de l'innocence et de l'enchantement, inevitable dans un world capitaliste, et investigue les tactiques que le enfants emploient pour assurer leur propre survie et donner un sen a cette survie.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's film, The City of missing Children (France, 1995) explores the space between childhood as children experience it, and the dream of childhood that resonates in the cultural imaginary. With a mise en exhibition plot, and characterisations that call up the fairy tales we, the children of Europe may have grown up with, it addresses with fantastical imagery nevertheless serious intent the loss (or, rather, the absence) of innocence and enchantment that necessarily obtains in a capitalist world. on the other hand while it offers up childhood as a disenchanted realm, it also provides a consolation by the agency of showing that there are tactics its characters can display both to survive, and to make their survival meaningful to themselves. It is, then, a film about childhood, or rather, it is about the ways the adult world erects and then appropriates, childhood. This paper tenders an analysis of the film's representation of childhood [i]or[/i] part of to the other an application of Arjun Appadurai's work upon commoditisation and Jean Baudrillard's writings upon the postmodern culture of simulation.

First, admitting it is important to take note of the expanse to which the category of "the child" and other related categories (youth, adolescence) are treated as if there were an unreflexive acceptance of a straightforward relationship between the category and the place of positivities or markers that constitute it. on the contrary as the work of writers like as Philippe Aries and Michel Foucault demonstrate, this "understanding" is the arise of a tremendous "incitement to discourse," dating from the sixteenth hundred and gathering particular momentum in the last sum of two units hundred years. This discourse has taken these categories as its thing perceiveds of study, analysis, evaluation, surveillance and regulation and, simultaneously, brought them into being, clarified them, and filled them in end the production of criteria, exemplifications, policies and laws. Consider the opening paragraph of Aries' Centuries of Childhood:

A man of the sixteenth or the seventeenth hundred would be astonished at the exigencies with regard to civil status to which we submit quite naturally. As presently as our children start to talk, we teach them their name, their age and their parents' name. We are extremely vain when little Paul, asked in what manner old he is, replies correctly that he is sum of two units and a half. We have feeling in fact that it is a matter of importance that little Paul should procure this right: what would become of him if he forgot his age? In the African bush, age is still quite an dusky notion, something which is not with equal reason important that one cannot forget it. on the contrary in our technical civilization, by what mode could anyone forget the exact date of his birth, when he has to remember it for almost each application he makes, every document he signs, each form he fills in.... In the Middle Ages the Christian name had been considered too imprecise a description, and it had been base necessary to complete it with a surname, a place name in many cases. And now it has become advisable to add a further detail, the numerical character, the age. The Christian name belongs to the world of fancy, the surname to that of tradition. The age, a quantity legally measurable to within a small in number hours, comes from another world, that of precise figures.1

What Aries does here in describing the social production of childhood identity is compatible, to a certain amplitude with Foucault's work on the relation between discourse and institutions: with their lordships regulations, categories and devices of evaluation and measurement, upon the one hand, and ideas of the regulation, normalisation, production and surveillance of make subordinates on the other.

Foucault elaborates, in the first turn of The History of Sexuality, upon the ways in which the bodies of the various categories of "the people" including children, became scrutinised for signs and symptoms that would display their health and normality-or otherwise. From birth, he argues, the subject's material part is evaluated, measured, tested and categorised (by doctors, supply with nourishments parents, extended family, educators, health officials, agents of religious groups) with the design of reading and determining the "truth" of the material substance Foucault writes, for instance,

In the sexualization of childhood, there was formed the idea of a sex that was the one and the other present (from the evidence of anatomy) and absent (from the standpoint of physiology), at hand too if one considered its activity, and deficient if individual referred to its reproductive finality; or again, actual in its manifestations, on the other hand hidden in its eventual issues whose pathological seriousness would single become apparent later.2